TonyWatchesMovies Video Game Review: Subnautica: 8.5 out of 10

When someone says "early access" I tend to correlate that with "unfinished". Why would I pay almost full price for a game that isn't fully complete so that it can be fixed later on down the line? However, I'm not one to talk, I bought Minecraft in the early beta and that was a revolutionary game before it was even finished. Seriously, the amount of people who have invested in that game even before it was completed set up Notch basically for life.

TonyWatchesMovies Score: 8.5 out of 10

Some will say that Subnautica is another Minecraft clone, and in a way, it is. YOU WILL FARM FOR MATERIALS IN THIS GAME, and it will be a litte more than tedious. However, there are a couple of things that set this game apart from the other Minecraft clones, in that they limit your freedom. Is that a bad thing? Absolutely not. With a limitation on how much you can affect the surrounding terrain, you can focus more on creating your life around the environment rather than changing the environment to suit you, which is a huge difference between Subnautica and Minecraft. Survival in this game is such an imperative part of the overall experience, and unlike other games where it's more of an easily-solved niusance, planning your adventures so that you won't die of starvation or water defficiency is something that is very valuable, and can make or break your success in Subnautica.

There's one pitfall in this game; once you know where all of the important building materials are, where to find the recipes and how to generate power, all challenge goes out the window. Seriously, 20 minutes into my second game I had no need of the escape pod because I had already created a self-sufficient base with a fabricator, 4 health pack generators and a moon pool for my submersible and had fortified my base to the point where every angry sea creature gave up and left. I'm not kidding, I was looking for one of the shark things for his teeth and I COULD NOT find a single one. Which is another part of this point as well; once you create a base for yourself with some kind of water vehicle, the rest of the game is farming. No joke, whether it's for food or for materials to make batteries (which I always ran out of), you will be scouring every corner of the ocean.

Something that bothers me is that you really have no way to know where you are unless you are constantly dropping beacons around so you know where all your stuff is. You can get accidentally turned around so many times in this game your head will spin. Kelp forests don't make it easier for you, one time I kept doing circles and didn't realize it so I starved to death. That will happen a lot, whether it's in the forest, the dunes, whatever. If in your HUD they had a minimap that would be nice, perhaps in the later versions.

Overall though, great game. Can't wait for what they do in the future.

Cheers,

-TonyWatchesMovies